Whose Civilisation? Classical Models, Empire and Emancipation

Conference review · Warburg Institute · Online day, 16 October 2026

Who could claim the classical past, and what did that claim authorise? This question ran through the papers and discussion I heard during the online day of the Warburg Institute’s conference, “Civilizing” the World, on 16 October. Across different settings, classical models could legitimise imperial authority, shape national identities or support emancipation. Their political significance depended upon who appropriated them, through which institutions, and towards what ends.

Classical authority and settler divisions

Logan Douglas’s paper, The Beit Bequest and the Artifice Underpinning Settler Colonialism, examined these questions through plaster casts donated to the South African National Gallery. Reproductions of classical sculpture carried claims about European civilisation into a society marked by dispossession and competing settler identities. Their apparent universality concealed particular ambitions: a collection could present European cultural authority as the natural foundation of public education and national life.

Yet white settler culture was itself contested. Douglas showed how British associations could make the casts unwelcome to Afrikaners, complicating attempts to construct a shared white South African identity. An object intended to consolidate imperial belonging might expose divisions among those whom it was supposed to unite. The reception of classical art was therefore shaped by local struggles over authority, rather than determined entirely by its donors.

Douglas’s most provocative suggestion concerned materiality. Plaster’s status as an inexpensive, fragile reproduction became a metaphor for the constructed character of settler colonial traditions. The analogy was suggestive, although the discussion raised an important qualification: judgements about copies also have histories. If casts were dismissed as secondary or merely pedagogical, we must ask how changing artistic values interacted with colonial politics. Material fragility cannot, by itself, explain political failure.

Shaping the national citizen

Katie Margerison’s Moral Bodies, Secular Virtues shifted attention to post-revolutionary Mexico and the magazine Educación Física. Here, classical models helped articulate the citizen whom the modern nation hoped to produce. Physical strength, cleanliness and discipline became signs of moral worth. The cultivated body promised to make national regeneration visible.

Her reading of a cover showing an athletic male figure moving the Mexica calendar stone brought the contradictions of this project into focus. Indigenous antiquity could be celebrated as a foundation of national identity while also being presented as something to overcome. In Margerison’s interpretation, the classical body supplied the visual language of progress, while the stone became an obstacle displaced by purposeful human action.

This bodily ideal also belonged to a struggle over moral authority. Physical education offered the state a means of cultivating civic virtue in a society where the Catholic Church had exercised considerable educational and spiritual influence. Secularisation could involve the redistribution of moral authority into new institutions and practices. The disciplined citizen became both the object of reform and evidence of its success.

Antiquity and emancipation

The final discussion complicated any assumption that classicism necessarily served domination. Geronimo Cristobal described how Spanish-educated Filipino ilustrados could appropriate Greek and Roman culture towards emancipatory ends. Antiquity offered resources extending beyond the authority of the Spanish Empire. Demonstrating command of its cultural language could become a way to challenge colonial claims to superiority.

These were not equivalent projects. Settler consolidation, national reform and emancipation involved different actors and exclusions. Their juxtaposition nevertheless revealed why classical forms cannot be assigned a single political meaning. Nor should an emancipatory appropriation automatically be treated as socially inclusive: questions remain about whose education enabled participation and whose experience remained marginal.

What emerged was a history of contested inheritance. Classical models acquired authority through museums, schools, publications and bodies, but their meanings remained open to revision. For intellectual history, the task is to reconstruct those acts of appropriation: how an apparently universal civilisation became a particular claim to rule, to reform, or to be free.

Sources and scope

This review draws on the author’s transcripts of Logan Douglas’s and Katie Margerison’s presentations and the final discussion, checked against the conference programme for “Civilizing” the World: Classicism, Neo-Classical Sculpture, and Plaster Casts in the Service of Imperial Powers and Post-Colonial Elites (1780–1945), Warburg Institute. It concerns the online sessions on 16 October 2026, rather than the subsequent conference days. The images are contextual illustrations, not reproductions of the speakers’ slides.

Word count: 608 words of main prose, excluding headings, captions and source information.

Cite this article

Samuel Woodall, “Whose Civilisation? Classical Models, Empire and Emancipation,” The Intellectual Historian, October 29, 2026, https://theintellectualhistorian.com/2026/10/29/whose-civilisation-classical-models-empire-emancipation/.